Unmasking the Rose: A Record of a Kundalini Initiation [Paperback]

Dorothy Walters (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2002

When she was in her early fifties, Dorothy Walters, a Midwestern college professor, had a profound experience that took her ten years to fully assimilate. She didn't almost die and come back; she didn't get abducted by black-eyed aliens; and she didn't float out of her body to visit other dimensions. No, she had a mystical experience that spontaneously unfolded right in her own body. Her kundalini awoke.

Kundalini is well-known in the East as the basic life force energy that normally sleeps in most people but can suddenly stir and start to radically transform everything in one's life, restructuring the self at the deepest level. When kundalini stirs-and this especially can happen at midlife—potentially all of consciousness gets illumined by its dazzling light. As Walters reveals, awakening kundalini can be a joyous and tumultuous ride until the body and psyche settle down. For her, it was an experience characterized by unimaginable bliss and bodily ecstasy as well as periods of intense pain and suffering.

"After years of avoiding psychic or intense spiritual encounters, I was singled out and captured by a new spiritual energy, one that appeared to originate within my body. My awakening was abrupt and unforeseen, my life transformed in a single instant of grace."

Unmasking the Rose is Dorothy Walters's frank and personal narrative of that ten-year ride on the kundalini wave, a unique day-by-day chronicle of her changes in which her only teacher was the inner guide, the solitary voice within.

For Walters, the process was well worth the extremes, for it opened for her a path of authentic union with the divine, with the "Beloved Within."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A middle-aged, Midwestern college professor who had never meditated, done yoga or even had a massage when her transmutation began, Walters (Marrow of Flame: Poems of the Spiritual Journey) proves in this personal narrative that the esoteric spiritual transformation of Kundalini is theoretically available to everyone. Enigmatic, ecstatic kundalini is the "snake" coiled at the base of the spine that winds upward, awakening all in its path, culminating in an explosion of the divine. Walters's journal-based story spans years to chronicle a sublime ecstasy and pain as she strove to balance the kundalini intensities in her body and psyche. Although the varying voices of the journal format detract from the effort, Walters generally gracefully untangles and illuminates an intensely personal and highly individual spiritual passage, an effort praised by prolific author Andrew Harvey, who wrote the introduction. Walters's journey began while she was focusing meditatively on an image of Hinduism's Shiva and Shakti in union. "Almost instantaneously, I felt a great surge of ecstatic energy in the lower chakras and then, within seconds, this intense force rushed upward and into my head. My very crown seemed to open in rapture, and for many minutes, I felt the energies of the unseen immensity flow in, as if petal after radiant petal were unfolding in my crown." Thus electrified and propelled to a new depth, Walters has created a worthy, probing memoir, useful for anyone seeking a firsthand account of " `God moving through your body.' Each visitation... a moment of holy embrace."
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Hampton Roads Publishing (June 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1571743014
• ISBN-13: 978-1571743015
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #783,968 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #51 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Other Eastern Religions > Sikhism

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Uneven, but worthwhile, May 20, 2004

By 

Evelyn Uyemura (Torrance, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Unmasking the Rose: A Record of a Kundalini Initiation (Paperback)

Unmasking the Rose is compiled from Dorothy Walters' private journals over the past 25 years or so, during which time she experienced a spontaneous awakening of an energy she barely understood: kundalini. Her book has both the strengths and the drawbacks of this method. On the one hand, we follow along with her as she gradually tries to cope with and make sense of what is happening to her. On the other hand, the journal entries are not dated, and the connecting narrative sometimes makes it a little unclear how much time has passed or what is going on outside the inner self. The introduction and the concluding chapter, writtem in a more direct style for publication, help to frame the middle chapters and give them more clarity.

As a Christian who is drawn to the mystical, I felt I needed to be introduced to kundalini. Walters certainly gives me a lot to think about. Her experience is primarily one of bliss. She attempts to describe as openly as she can her actual experience, and I am left with the understanding that kundalini feels like sexual pleasure transmuted so that it pervades the entire being. It occurs in the head, not as mental images, but as actual sensation.

I am attracted to her insistence that the path to awakening is not out of the body but in more fully uniting body and spirit. This, in my opinion (though not in hers), is in fact what Christianity actually indicates. She also speaks of the fact that the image of Christ on the cross is the final image that will occur to a Christian being awakened. The lives of the Catholic saints certainly confirms that fact.

On the other hand, the fact that Walters is a lesbian, dabbled in the occult, and uses primarily Hindu imagery in her explanations, challenges me.

And if synchronicities mean anything, I can't overlook the fact that her initiation began when she was the exact same age as I now am, in the exact same profession, and that she wrote a book on the same author that I wrote my master's thesis on.

The bottom line is that I have a better and more positive impression of what kundalini is all about. And I am left to wonder if the story of Genesis, where a serpent suggests to Adam and Eve that they eat of a forbidden tree and become like gods, is in fact a specific rejection of kundalini by the Hebrews. Since kundalini (despite the serpent image, which seems male) is considered to me a female power (goddess, even), is it possible that it was rejected in order to allow patriarchy to gain the ascendency? Or is it a warning from God Himself to avoid this serpent power?

I am left with these questions.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Kundalini made understandable, November 4, 2006

By 

Patricia Lay Dorsey (Detroit, MI, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Unmasking the Rose: A Record of a Kundalini Initiation (Paperback)

It's hard to put into words how helpful I found this book to be. Dorothy Walter's way of describing her personal kundalini awakening makes this often nebulous phenonmenon accessible and understandable to novices and experienced practitioners alike. Too often such mystical experiences are presented in ways that tend to make one feel these are mountain-top moments not meant for the so-called average person. I mean we aren't all Ram Dass or St. John of the Cross or some guru living in an ashram in India. We are folks who go to work, clean our homes, raise our children, shop in grocery stores, drive cars on the freeway, get angry when someone tailgates us too close. I mean, we're simply human.

Well, Dorothy Walters is human too, yet she has experienced the highest form of spiritual arousal not once, not twice, but on a regular basis for decades. It happens when she slows down, tunes out and quiets herself. That makes sense. Everything she says makes sense.

Of all the many--countless, actually--spiritual books I've read, "Unmasking the Rose" comes the closest to the Truth. The truth that spiritual experiences are not for the already-enlightened, but for everyone. Everyone who is willing to open that door and walk through it, that is. Not that we will all experience kundalini in either its blissful or painful aspects, but that we all have the POTENTIAL to do so.

I thank Dorothy Walters for telling her story so we will have the courage to LIVE our stories, wherever they might lead us.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Masterpiece of honesty and candor, July 8, 2002

By 

A Kundalini reader (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Unmasking the Rose: A Record of a Kundalini Initiation (Paperback)

I am so overwhelmed that I will be short in my praise : This book should be handed out free; It is simply a masterpiece of spirituality>Ms Walters shares with us her struggles to understand the amazing process taking place within her 'regular' life and the revolutionary leap it creates;
We all have to learn from Dorothy Walters; May God bless her and her superb work.